invariably possesses one great merit. When we read the outpourings of
the seventeenth and eighteenth century poets to the innumerable Julias,
Sacharissas, and Celias whom they celebrated in verse, we cannot but
feel that we are often in contact with a display of spurious passion
which is the outcome of the head rather than of the heart. Thus Johnson
tells us that Prior's Chloe "was probably sometimes ideal, but the woman
with whom he cohabited was a despicable drab of the lowest species." The
case of popular and patriotic poetry is very different. It is wholly
devoid of affectation. Whatever be its literary merits or demerits, it
always represents some genuine and usually deep-rooted conviction. It
enables us to gauge the national aspirations of the day, and to
estimate the character of the nation whose yearnings found expression in
song. The following lines--written by Bishop Still, the reputed author
of "Gammer Gurton's Needle"--very faithfully represent the feelings
excited in England at the time of the Spanish Armada:
We will not change our Credo
For Pope, nor boke, nor bell;
And yf the Devil come himself
We'll hounde him back to hell.
The fiery Protestant spirit which is breathed forth in these lines found
its counterpart in Germany. Luther, at a somewhat earlier period, wrote:
Erhalt uns, Herr, bei deinem Wort,
Und steur des Papsts und Türken Mord.
Take again the case of French Revolutionary poetry. The noble, as also
the ignoble, sides of that vast upheaval were alike represented in the
current popular poetry of the day. Posterity has no difficulty in
understanding why the whole French nation was thrilled by Rouget de
Lisle's famous song, to whose lofty strains the young conscripts rushed
to the frontier in order to hurl back the invaders of their country. On
the other hand, the ferocity of the period found expression in such
lines as:
Ah! ça ira, ça ira, ça ira!
Les aristocrates à la lanterne,
which was composed by one Ladré, a street singer, or in the savage
"Carmagnole," a name originally applied to a peasant costume worn in the
Piedmontese town of Carmagnola, and afterwards adopted by the Maenads
and Bacchanals, who sang and danced in frenzied joy over the judicial
murder of poor "Monsieur et Madame Véto."
The light-hearted and characteristically Latin buoyancy of the French
nation, which they have inherited from the days of that fifth-century
Gaulish bishop (Salvianus) who said that the Roman world was laughing
when it died ("moritur et ridet"), and which has stood them in good
stead in many an arduous trial, is also fully represented in their
national poetry. No other people, after such a crushing defeat as that
incurred at Pavia, would have been convulsed with laughter over the
innumerable stanzas which have immortalised their slain commander, M. de
la Palisse:
Il mourut le vendredi,
Le dernier jour de son âge;
S'il fut mort le samedi,
Il eût vécu davantage.
The inchoate national aspirations, as also the grave and resolute
patriotism of the Germans, found interpreters of genius in the persons
of Arndt and Körner, the latter of whom laid down his life for the
people whom he loved so well. During the Napoleonic period all their
compositions, many of which will live so long as the German language
lasts, strike the same note--the determination of Germans to be free:
Lasst klingen, was nur klingen kann,
Die Trommeln und die Flöten!
Wir wollen heute Mann für Mann
Mit Blut das Eisen röten.
Mit Henkerblut, Französenblut--
O süsser Tag der Rache!
Das klinget allen Deutschen gut,
Das ist die grosse Sache.
Some six decades later, when Arndt's famous question "Was ist das
deutsche Vaterland?" was about to receive a practical answer, the German
soldier marched to the frontier to the inspiriting strains of "Die Wacht
am Rhein."
No more characteristic national poetry was ever written than that evoked
by the civil war which raged in America some fifty years ago. Those who,
like the present writer, were witnesses on the spot of some portion of
that great struggle, are never likely to forget the different
impressions left on their minds by the poetry respectively of the North
and of the South. The pathetic song of the Southerners, "Maryland, my
Maryland," which was composed by Mr. T.R. Randall, appeared, even
whilst the contest was still undecided, to embody the plaintive wail of
a doomed cause, and stood in strong contrast to the aggressive and
almost rollicking vigour of "John Brown's Body" and "The Union for ever,
Hurrah, boys, Hurrah!"
Even a nation so little distinguished in literature as the Ottoman Turks
is able, under the stress of genuine patriotism, to embody its hopes and
aspirations in stirring verse. The following, which was written during
the last Russo-Turkish war, suffers in translation. Its rhythm and
heroic, albeit savage, vigour may perhaps even be appreciated by those
who are not familiar with the language in which it is written:
Achalum sanjaklari!
Ghechelim Balkanlari!
Allah! Allah! deyerek,
Dushman kanin' ichelim!
Padishahmiz chok yasha!
Ghazi Osman chok yasha![109]
Let us now turn to Italy and Greece, the nations from which modern
Europe inherits most of its ideas, and which have furnished the greater
part of the models in which those ideas are expressed, whether in prose
or in verse.
Although lines from Virgil, who may almost be said to have created Roman
Imperialism, have been found scribbled on the walls of Pompeii, it is
probable that in his day no popular poetry, in the sense in which we
should understand the word, existed. But there is something extremely
pathetic--more especially in the days when the Empire was hastening to
its ruin--in the feeling, little short of adoration, which the Latin
poets showed to the city of Rome, and in the overweening confidence
which they evinced in the stability of Roman rule. This feeling runs
through the whole of Latin literature from the days of Ovid and Virgil
to the fifth-century Rutilius, who was the last of the classic poets.
Virgil speaks of Rome as "the mistress of the world" (maxima rerum
Roma). Claudian deified Rome, "O numen amicum et legum genetrix," and
Rutilius wrote:
Exaudi, regina tui pulcherrima mundi,
Inter sidereos Roma recepta polos,
Exaudi, genetrix hominum, genetrixque deorum,
Non procul a caelo per tua templa sumus.
Modern Italians have made ample amends for any lack of purely popular
poetry which may have prevailed in the days of their ancestors. It
would, indeed, have been strange if the enthusiasm for liberty which
arose in the ranks of a highly gifted and emotional nation such as the
Italians had not found expression in song. When the proper time came,
Giusti, Carducci, Mameli, Gordigiani, and scores of others voiced the
patriotic sentiments of their countrymen. They all dwelt on the theme
embodied in the stirring Garibaldian hymn:
Va fuori d'Italia!
Va fuori, o stranier!
It will suffice to quote, as an example of the rest, one stanza from an
"Inno di Guerra" chosen at random from a collection of popular poetry
published at Turin in 1863:
Coraggio ... All' armi, all' armi,
O fanti e cavalieri,
Snudiamo ardenti e fieri,
Snudiam l'invitto acciar!
Dall' Umbria mesto e oppresso
Ci chiama il pio fratello,
Rispondasi all' appello,
Corriamo a guerreggiar!
The cramping isolation of the city-states of ancient Greece arrested the
growth of Hellenic nationalism, and therefore precluded the birth of any
genuinely nationalist poetry. But it only required the occasion to arise
in order to give birth to patriotic song. Such an occasion was furnished
when, under the pressing danger of Asiatic invasion, some degree of
Hellenic unity and cohesion was temporarily achieved. Then the tuneful
Simonides recorded the raising of an altar to "Zeus, the free man's god,
a fair token of freedom for Hellas."
In more modern times the long struggle for Greek independence produced a
crop of poets who, if they could not emulate the dignity and linguistic
elegance of their predecessors, were none the less able to express their
national aspirations in rugged but withal very tuneful verse which went
straight to the hearts of their countrymen. The Klephtic ballads played
a very important part in rousing the Greek spirit during the
Graeco-Turkish war at the beginning of the last century. The fine ode of
the Zantiote Solomos has been adopted as the national anthem, whilst the
poetry of another Ionian, Aristotle Valaorites, and of numerous others
glows with genuine and perfervid patriotism. But perhaps the greatest
nationalist poet that modern Greece has produced was Rhigas Pheraios,
who, as proto-martyr in the Greek cause, was executed by the Turks in
1798, with the prophecy on his dying lips that he had "sown a rich seed,
and that the hour was coming when his country would reap its glorious
fruits." His Greek Marseillaise (Δεύτε παῖδες τῶν Ἑλλήνων) is known to
Englishmen through Byron's translation, "Sons of the Greeks, arise,
etc." But the glorious lilt and swing of his _Polemisterion_, though
probably familiar to every child in Greece, is less known in this
country. The lines,
καλλίτερα μιᾶς ὥρας ἐλευθέρη ζωή,
παρὰ σαράντα χρόνων σκλαβιὰ καὶ φυλακή,
recall to the mind Tennyson's
Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay.
[Footnote 109:
Let us unfurl the standards!
Let us cross the Balkans!
Shouting "Allah! Allah!"
Let us drink the blood of the foe!
Long live our Padishah!
Long live Ghazi Osman!
]
XXIX
SONGS, NAVAL AND MILITARY
_"The Spectator," September 20, 1913_
A British Aeschylus, were such a person conceivable, might very fitly
tell his countrymen, in the words addressed to Prometheus some
twenty-three centuries ago, that they would find no friend more staunch
than Oceanus:
οὐ γὰρ ποτ' ἐρεῖς ὡς Ὠκεανοῦ
φίλος ἐστὶ βεβαιότερός σοι.
In truth, the whole national life of England is summed up in the fine
lines of Swinburne:
All our past comes wailing in the wind,
And all our future thunders in the sea.
The natural instincts of a maritime nation are brought out in strong
relief throughout the whole of English literature, from its very birth
down to the present day. The author of "The Lay of Beowulf," whoever he
may have been, rivalled Homer in the awe-stricken epithets he applied to
the "immense stream of ocean murmuring with foam" (_Il._ xviii. 402).
"Then," he wrote, "most like a bird, the foamy-necked floater went
wind-driven over the sea-wave; ... the sea-timber thundered; the wind
over the billows did not hinder the wave-floater in her course; the
sea-goer put forth; forth over the flood floated she, foamy-necked, over
the sea-streams, with wreathed prow until they could make out the cliffs
of the Goths."
Although the claim of Alfred the Great to be the founder of the British
navy is now generally rejected by historians, it is certain that from
the very earliest times the need of dominating the sea was present in
the minds of Englishmen, and that this feeling gained in strength as the
centuries rolled on and the value of sea-power became more and more
apparent. In a poem entitled "The Libel of English Policy," which is
believed to have been written about the year 1436, the following lines
occur:
Kepe then the see abought in specialle,
Whiche of England is the rounde walle;
As thoughe England were lykened to a cité.
And the walle enviroun were the see.
Kepe then the see, that is the walle of England,
And then is England kepte by Goddes sonde.
A long succession of poets dwelt on the same theme. Waller--presumably
during a Royalist phase of his chequered career--addressed the King in
lines which forestalled the very modern political idea that a powerful
British navy is not only necessary for the security of England, but also
affords a guarantee for the peace of all the world:
Where'er thy navy spreads her canvas wings
Homage to thee, and peace to all, she brings.
Thomson's "Rule, Britannia," was not composed till 1740, but before that
time the heroism displayed both by the navy collectively and by
individual sailors was frequently celebrated in popular verse. The death
of Admiral Benbow, who continued to give orders after his leg had been
carried off by a chain-shot at the battle of Carthagena in 1702, is
recorded in the lines:
While the surgeon dressed his wounds
Thus he said, thus he said,
While the surgeon dressed his wounds thus he said:
"Let my cradle now in haste
On the quarter-deck be placed,
That my enemies I may face
Till I'm dead, till I'm dead."
But it was more especially the long struggle with Napoleon that led to
an outburst of naval poetry. It is to the national feelings current
during this period that we owe such songs as "The Bay of Biscay, O," by
Andrew Cherry; "Hearts of Oak," by David Garrick[110]; "The Saucy
Arethusa," by Prince Hoare; "A Wet Sheet and a Flowing Sea," by Allan
Cunningham; "Ye Mariners of England," by Thomas Campbell, and a host of
others. Amongst this nautical choir, Charles Dibdin, who was born in
1745, stands pre-eminent. Sir Cyprian Bridge, in his introduction to Mr.
Stone's collection of _Sea Songs_, tells us that it is doubtful whether
Dibdin's songs "were ever very popular on the forecastle." The really
popular songs, he thinks, were of a much more simple type, and were
termed "Fore-bitters," from the fact that the man who sang them took his
place on the fore-bitts, "a stout construction of timber near the
foremast, through which many of the principal ropes were led." However
this may be, there cannot be the smallest doubt that Dibdin's songs
exercised a very powerful effect on landsmen, and contributed greatly to
foster national pride in the navy and popular sympathy with sailors. It
was presumably a cordial recognition of this fact that led Pitt to grant
him a pension. It would, indeed, be difficult to conceive poetry more
calculated to make the chord of national sentiment vibrate responsively
than "Tom Bowling" or that well-known song in which Dibdin depicted at
once the high sense of duty and the rough, albeit affectionate,
love-making of "Poor Jack":
I said to our Poll, for, d'ye see, she would cry,
When last we made anchor for sea,
What argufies sniv'ling and piping your eye?
Why, what a damn'd fool you must be!
. . . . .
As for me in all weathers, all times, tides and ends,
Nought's a trouble from duty that springs,
For my heart is my Poll's, and my rhino my friend's,
And as for my life it's the King's;
Even when my time comes, ne'er believe me so soft
As for grief to be taken aback,
For the same little cherub that sits up aloft
Will look out a good berth for poor Jack!
Pride in the navy and its commanders is breathed forth in the following
eulogy of Admiral Jervis (Lord St. Vincent):
You've heard, I s'pose, the people talk
Of Benbow and Boscawen,
Of Anson, Pocock, Vernon, Hawke,
And many more then going;
All pretty lads, and brave, and rum,
That seed much noble service;
But, Lord, their merit's all a hum,
Compared to Admiral Jervis!
"Tom Tough" is an example of the same spirit:
I've sailed with gallant Howe, I've sailed with noble Jervis,
And in valiant Duncan's fleet I've sung yo, heave ho!
Yet more ye shall be knowing,
I was cox'n to Boscawen,
And even with brave Hawke have I nobly faced the foe.
Perfervid patriotism and ardent loyalty find expression in the following
swinging lines:
Some drank our Queen, and some our land,
Our glorious land of freedom;
Some that our tars might never stand
For heroes brave to lead 'em!
That beauty in distress might find
Such friends as ne'er would fail her;
But the standing toast that pleased the most
Was--the wind that blows, the ship that goes,
And the lass that loves the sailor!
The whole-hearted Gallophobia which prevailed at the period, but which
did not preclude generous admiration for a gallant foe, finds, of
course, adequate expression in most of the songs of the period. Thus an
unknown author, who, it is believed, lived at the commencement rather
than at the close of the eighteenth century, wrote:
Stick stout to orders, messmates,
We'll plunder, burn, and sink,
Then, France, have at your first-rates,
For Britons never shrink:
We'll rummage all we fancy,
We'll bring them in by scores,
And Moll and Kate and Nancy
Shall roll in louis-d'ors.
It was long before this spirit died out. Twenty-two years after the
battle of Waterloo, when, on the occasion of the coronation of Queen
Victoria, Marshal Soult visited England and it was suggested that the
Duke of Wellington should propose the health of the French army at a
public dinner, he replied: "D---- 'em. I'll have nothing to do with them
but beat them."
Inspiriting songs, such as "When Johnny comes marching home" and "The
British Grenadiers," which, Mr. Stone informs us, "cannot be older than
1678, when the Grenadier Company was formed, and not later than 1714,
when hand-grenades were discontinued," abundantly testify to the fact
that the British soldier has also not lacked poets to vaunt his prowess.
Many of the military songs have served as a distinct stimulus to
recruiting, and possibly some of them were written with that express
object in view. Sir Ian Hamilton, in his preface to Mr. Stone's
collection of _War Songs_, says, "The Royal Fusiliers are the heroes of
a modern but inspiriting song, 'Fighting with the 7th Royal Fusiliers.'
It was composed in the early 'nineties, and produced such an
overwhelming rush of recruits that the authorities could easily, had
they so chosen, have raised several additional battalions." The writer
of the present article remembers in his childhood to have learnt the
following lines from his old nurse, who was the widow of a corporal in
the army employed in the recruiting service:
'Twas in the merry month of May,
When bees from flower to flower do hum,
And soldiers through the town march gay,
And villagers flock to the sound of the drum.
Young Roger swore he'd leave his plough,
His team and tillage all begun;
Of country life he'd had enow,
He'd leave it all and follow the drum.
The British military has perhaps been somewhat less happily inspired
than the naval muse. Nevertheless the army can boast of some good
poetry. "Why, soldiers, why?" the authorship of which is sometimes
erroneously attributed to Wolfe, is a fine song, and the following lines
written by an unknown author after the crushing blow inflicted on Lord
Galway's force at Almanza, in 1707, display that absence of
discouragement after defeat which is perhaps one of the most severe
tests by which the discipline and spirit of an army can be tried:
Let no brave soldier be dismayed
For losing of a battle;
We have more forces coming on
Will make Jack Frenchman rattle.
Abundant evidence might be adduced to show that the British soldier is
amenable to poetic influences. Sir Adam Fergusson, writing to Sir Walter
Scott on August 31, 1811, said that the canto of the _Lady of the Lake_
describing the stag hunt "was the favourite among the rough sons of the
fighting Third Division," and Professor Courthope in his _History of
English Poetry_ quotes the following passage from Lockhart's _Life of
Scott_:
When the _Lady of the Lake_ first reached Sir Adam Fergusson, he
was posted with his company on a point of ground exposed to the
enemy's artillery; somewhere no doubt on the lines of Torres
Vedras. The men were ordered to lie prostrate on the ground; while
they kept that attitude, the Captain, kneeling at their head, read
aloud the description of the battle in Canto VI., and the listening
soldiers only interrupted him by a joyous huzza whenever the French
shot struck the bank close above them.
Finally, before leaving this subject, it may be noted that amidst the
verse, sometimes pathetic and sometimes rollicking, which appealed more
especially to the naval and military temperament, there occasionally
cropped up a political allusion which is very indicative of the state of
popular feeling at the time the songs were composed. Thus the following,
from a song entitled "A cruising we will go," shows the unpopularity of
the war waged against the United States in 1812:
Be Britain to herself but true,
To France defiance hurled;
Give peace, America, with you,
And war with all the world.
The sixteenth-century Spaniards embodied a somewhat similar maxim of
State policy as applied to England in the following distich, the
principle of which was, however, flagrantly violated by that fervent
Catholic, Philip II.:
Con todo el mundo guerra
Y paz con Inglaterra.
[Footnote 110: Since writing the above it has been pointed out to me
that Garrick's song was composed during the Seven Years' War
(1756-63).]
INDEX
Abu'l'Ala, 65
Acton, Lord, and the Turks, 80, 223, 266
Acton, Lord, on the making of history, 432
Adrianople, occupation of, 411
Akbar, Emperor, 40
Alexandria, society at, 228
Alfred the Great, 450
Algeria, French in, 250-263
Alison, 216
Alliteration, 71
Almanza, song on defeat at, 456
America and Free Trade, 134, 138
America, war with, in 1812, unpopularity of, 457
Amherst, Lord, occupies Burma, 288
Anarchy, 20
Ancient Art and Ritual, 361-371
Andrade, Colonel Freire d', 380, 383, 384
Anglo-French Agreement of 1904, 162, 167
Anglo-Saxon individualism, 15
Anthology, translations from, 72
Anthropology, bases of, 364
Antigonus Gonatas, 351
Anti-Slavery Society, 373
Apollo Belvedere, 370
Aratus of Sicyon, 358
Army reform, 107-126
Arndt, national poetry, 443
Arthur, Sir George, 123
Asoka, 355
Assouan dam, 296
Athenaeus, on dancing, 370
Attwood, Mr. Charles, 196
Aulard, M., on Taine, 430
_Aurengzebe_, 73
Australia, field of anthropology, 365
Bacchylides, 65
Bacon, 31
Barère, 299
Barth, Dr., on Hinduism, 88
Beaconsfield, Lord, and Egypt, 203
Beaconsfield, Lord, and Empress of India, 422
Bembo, Cardinal, 56
Benbow, Admiral, death of, 451
Beowulf, on the sea, 450
Berthier, Marshal, 279
Bismarck, Prince, on statesmanship, 251
_Bleak House_, 119
Blennerhassett, Lady, 427-438
Blücher, Marshal, hallucinations of, 285
Blunt, Mr. Wilfrid, 81
Bodley, Mr., on French administration, 436
Boell, M. Paul, 418
Bolingbroke, 182
Bossuet, definition of heretic, 307
Boufflers, Madame de, 231
Brahmanism, Sir A. Lyall on, 89
Bright, John, and Disraeli, 183
British officials and parliamentary institutions, 27
Browning, Mrs., 60
Brunnow, Baron, and the Balkan States, 275
Bryce, Mr., on the writing of history, 214
Budget system, 44
Buffon, on style, 184
Bugeaud, Marshal, 257
Bureaucracy, Continental, 29
Burgoyne, Sir John, 281
Burke, on fiscal symmetry, 39
Burma, 287-297
Butcher, Dr. S, on Eastern politics, 26
Cabarrus, La (Madame Tallien), 298-306
Cambronne, 298
Campbell, Lord, Disraeli on, 186
Canada and Free Trade, 131
Capitulations in Egypt, 156-174
Capo d'Istria, Count, 271
Cardwell, Lord, 109, 116, 117, 119
Carlyle, 219
"Carmagnole," the, 442
Cavagnari, Major, murder of, 100
Cavour, 269, 272
Centralisation, 34
Chamberlain, Mr. Joseph, 244, 248
China, 141-155
Chinese labour, 147
Chinese War of 1860, 120
Chitnavis, Sir Gangadhar, 334, 335
Chremonides, 357, 358
Christianity, effect on Roman Empire, 7-19, 52, 53
Claudian on duration of Roman Empire, 1
Clinton, Mr. Fynes, 216
Cobden, Mr., 127
Cobdenism, abuse of, 328
Coleridge, on poetry, 59
Coleridge, on prose, 55
Collier, Jeremy, on Cranmer's death, 56
Commerce and Imperialism, 11
Confucianism, 143, 153
Constantinople, foundation of, 7
Constitutions in the East, 141
Cornwallis, Lord, 36
_Corvée_ in Egypt, 396
Cory, Mr. William, 69
Cowley's translation of Claudian, 67
Creighton, 222
Crewe, Marquis of, 330
Crimean War and India, 410
Crowe, Sir Eyre, 375
Curiales, Fiscal Oppression of, 21
Curtius Rufinus, 356
Curtius, Professor, on the Greek language, 226
Curzon, Lord, on army affairs, 243
Cyprus, occupation of, 276, 413
Danton, 302, 303
Deffand, Madame du, 212
Delhi, transfer of Indian Capital to, 424
Delos, possession of, 358
Demetrius, on style, 227
Democracy and Imperialism, 23
Democritus, epigram of, 231
Demolins, M., on Anglo-Saxons, 15, 28
Demosthenes, Professor Bury, on oratory, 57
Derby, Lord, the Rupert of debate, 184
Dibdin, 452-454
Didactic poetry, 61
Dietzel, Professor, 137, 337
Dino, Duchesse de, 59
Disraeli, 177-203
Dithyramb, meaning of word, 361
Dostoïevsky, 205, 210